Sunday, September 20, 2015

When In a Hole, Stop Digging

Or, when you help run your party's clown car into a ditch, stop gunning the engine and spinning your wheels.
Scott Walker is now polling at literally 0%, according to one poll ironically named the CNN/ORC poll.
Jeb Bush is polling at 6% nationwide, including California. Despite a trickle of support weaker than Dick Cheney's urine stream from Governors, mayors, members of Congress and an inexplicably sought-after endorsement from Eric Cantor, the first and only minority leader since 1899 to lose a primary, Bush just can't ignite the wet log of his campaign.
Mike Huckabee can't even get in the news anymore without latching onto a couple of homophobic hillbillies in Rowan County well outside his native Arkansas.
Marco Rubio is a mere sparring partner in a field of political bantamweights. Ted Cruz is finally getting the national exposure he needs and he's not faring well in it. One doesn't need Barbara Boxer to remind us Carly Fiorina will always be the face of corporate greed. And the rest of the field is too risible to even mention aloud.
Yes, political wisdom tells us to stop digging when one finds oneself in a hole. But sociopaths like Donald Trump and Ben Carson, the two GOP front-runners, are doing the opposite. And it's working. And it seems the deeper they dig that hole, the closer they get to some political bizarro world that's looking more and more like a throwback to the early 60's.
The log-jammed Republican field that's resulted in just one dropout (Rick Perry, who had three reasons for pulling out but can't remember the third one) is naturally going to result in low poll numbers for almost everyone and with so many noxious right wing confections to choose from, much support will be withheld until the Republican field is finally culled and mitigated.
What's notable, however, is that the two Republican front-runners are Donald Trump and Ben Carson, two men with a complete lack of political experience. If this isn't symptomatic of the Teabaggers' dissatisfaction with the Republican establishment, then nothing is.
Of course, we all know what's saving the day for these two stupendously unqualified men and their only issue that's likeliest to energize the largely white Republican base: Racism and Islamophobia.
Whether it be Trump calling Mexicans rapists, banning a respected Mexican journalist from a press conference, promising to build a wall around the southern border or failing to object when a fellow Republican makes an Islamophobic remark during the last debate, we all know what Trump stands for and we recognize that he knows his racist platform is working.
Donald Trump actually thinks he can sneer, bluster, lie and insult his way to the White House, even though his best poll numbers put him nearly in double digits behind Hillary Clinton.
Unlike his last campaign, which was revealed early on to be pure political theater designed to get him publicity for his NBC show, Trump was shrewd enough to recognize that pandering to the low-information, mouth-breather base that's sick and tired of 6 1/2 years of a Muslim, Kenyan, Commie, Socialist, Fascist, gay, gun-grabbing president is the way to go.

The fact that so many people, often one percenters like Tom Brady and racists, are rabidly latching onto Trump like shipwrecked sailors on a dead man's chest is disturbing enough. Donald Trump is about as far from qualified for the presidency as one could possibly get. The very fact that the racist, disgraced Hulk Hogan publicly wants to be Trump's running mate alone speaks volumes and, should that come true, we'd literally be living the movie Idiocracy.
And we can laugh at Trump and the other 15 psychopaths in the GOP field (and we have and will, often) but one fact remains disturbingly clear: One of them has to get the nomination. And the top psycho leading the pack is a spoiled, tax-dodging multi-billionaire who's seemingly based his entire campaign on racist, misogynistic tweets and making an endless series of childish emoji faces during the debates. And the nominee may be him. Since he threw his double weave in the ring back in June, Trump's always been either #1 or a close second.
What Carson is having right now is a political Indian summer, a brief bump in the polls after his debate performance and saying on one of those talking head shows that he wouldn't want a Muslim as President. It was an astoundingly stupid and pointless thing to say because there's no chance anyone from Islam next year will get elected president. Or it's stupid by implying President Obama is Muslim.
It's also arrogant and bigoted in its assumption that a Muslim cannot safeguard our nation's best interests.
Ben Carson will never get elected President because there simply aren't enough mouth-breathers on the seedy side of the tracks to be much impressed with his token status that would convince themselves they're not racist. And one can get anti-welfare/anti-Muslim rhetoric from anyone else on the GOP side. In the end, Carson will be remembered in political circles as the black Republican who tried to pull up the ladder after he'd made it on a steady stream of progressive/liberal programs that made him a neurosurgeon.
So, since the Trump Bump has turned into a flat, unobstructed highway leading straight to Cleveland, we have to conclude this orange-faced, bellowing baboon will be the nominee. That may prove to be good news for the Democratic nominee, whether it be Hillary or Bernie Sanders. It may also prove to be a nightmare. If anything, we've seen a shocking resurgence in the racism many of us in their 50's had seen back in the 60's.
We've seen a spate of police shootings and murders of unarmed African Americans, the steady stream of invariably white police apologists who contort their thinking to justify such crimes even to the point of smearing dead children and manufacturing evidence, and, lastly, we've been easily able to draw an unbroken line between the KKK and police on a national scale (a cozy, never-severed relationship going all the way back to early 18th century South Carolina).
We need to stop feigning shock when a white racist is turned up. They're like vermin: For every John Rocker, Michael Richards or Paula Deen that's turned up, 10,000 more have yet to be. If Trump gets the nomination, it's already abundantly obvious every racist in the nation will flock to him either by default or because they actually love him for mirroring their own virulent racism.
Imagine a Donald Trump backed by virtually the entire South, the newly-unmasked racist law enforcement apparatus, every Teabagger fancying themself a patriot, the NRA and every sundry and assorted racist asshole who persists on flying a confederate flag or believing Obama is a Muslim Jew hater from Kenya.
That's a lot more support than we seem to be currently willing to believe Trump would get if he becomes the nominee.
Because one doesn't have to dig too deeply before finding the worms.